“He said not to forget my comb,” Joe said. “I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, but what else is new?”
“That’s okay,” Ralph said, and smiled a little. “It’s one of the few things I do understand. Come on, Lois-let’s check out the crowd.
Mingle a little.”
Halfway across the parking lot, she elbowed him so hard in the side that Ralph staggered. “Look!” she whispered. “Right over there!
Isn’t that Connie Chung?”
Ralph looked. Yes; the woman in the beige coat standing between two techs with the CBS logo on their ’jackets was almost certainly Connie Chung. He had admired her pretty, intelligent face and pleasant smile over too many evening meals to have much doubt about it.
“Either her or her twin sister,” he said.
Lois seemed to have forgotten all about Old Dor and High Fidge and the bald docs; in that moment she was once more the woman Bill McGovern had liked to call “Our Lois.”
“I’ll be darned!
What’s she doing here?”
“Well,” Ralph began, and then covered his mouth to hide a jawcracking yawn, “I guess what’s going on in Derry is national news now. She must be here to do a live segment in front of the Civic Center for tonight’s news. In any case-” Suddenly, with no warning at all, the auras swam back. Ralph gasped.
“Jesus! Lois, are you seeing this?”
But he didn’t think she was. If she had been, Ralph didn’t think Connie Chung would have rated even an honorable mention on Lois’s attention-roster. This was horrible almost beyond conceiving, and for the first time Ralph fully realized that even the bright world of auras had its dark side, one that would make an ordinary person fall on his knees and thank God for his reduced perceptions.
And this isn’t even stepping up the ladder, he thought. At least, I don’t think it is. I’m only looking at that wider world, like a man looking through a window. I’m not actually in it.
Nor did he want to be in it. just looking at something like this was almost enough to make you wish you were blind.
Lois was frowning at him. “What, the colors? No. Should I try to? Is there something wrong with them?”
He tried to answer and couldn’t. A moment later he felt her hand seize his arm in a painful pincers grip above the elbow and knew that no explanation was necessary. For better or worse, Lois was now seeing for herself.
“Oh dear,” she whimpered in a breathless little voice that teetered on the edge of tears. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh jeer Louise.”
From the roof of Derry Home, the aura hanging over the Civic Center had looked like a vast, saggy umbrella-the Travelers Insurance Company logo colored black by a child’s crayon, perhaps.
Standing here in the parking lot, it was like being inside a large and indescribably nasty mosquito net, one so old and badly cared for that its gauzy walls had silted up with blackish-green mildew. The bright October sun shrank to a bleary circle of tarnished silver. The air took on a gloomy, foggy cast that made Ralph think of pictures of London at the end of the nineteenth century. They were not just looking at the Civic Center deathbag, not anymore; they were buried alive in it. Ralph could feel it pressing hungrily in on him, trying to overwhelm him with feelings of loss and despair and dismay.
Why bother? he asked himself, watching apathetically as Joe Wyzer’s Ford drove back down toward Main Street with Old Dor still sitting in the back seat. I mean hey, really, what the hell is the use?
We can’t change this thing, no way we can. Maybe we did something out at High Ridge, but the difference between what was going on out there and what’s happening here is like the difference between a smudge and a black hole. If we try to mess in with this business, we’re going to get flattened.
He heard moaning from beside him and realized Lois was crying.
Mustering his flagging energy, he slid an arm around her shoulders.
“Hold on, Lois,” he said. “We can stand up to this.” But he wondered.
“We’re breathing it in.” she wept. “It’s like we’re sucking up death! Oh, Ralph, let’s get away from here! Please let’s just get away from here! “The idea sounded as good to him as the idea of water must sound to a man dying of thirst in the desert, but he shook his head.
“Two thousand people are going to die here tonight if we don’t do something. I’m pretty confused about the rest of this business but that much I can grasp with no trouble at all.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Just keep your arm around me so I don’t crack my head open if I faint.”
It was ironic, Ralph thought. They now had the faces and bodies of people in the early years of a vigorous middle age, but they shuffled across the parking lot like a pair of old-timers whose muscles have turned to string and whose bones have turned to glass. He could hear Lois’s breathing, rapid and labored, like the breathing of a woman who has just sustained some serious injury.
“I’ll take you back if you want,” Ralph said, and he meant it. He would take her back to the parking lot, he would take her to the orange bus-stop bench he could see from here. And when the bus came, getting on and going back to Harris Avenue would be the simplest thing in the world.
He could feel the killer aura which surrounded this place pressing in on him, trying to smother him like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and he found himself remembering something McGovern had said about May Locher’s emphysema-that it was one of those diseases that keep on giving. And now he supposed he had a pretty good idea of how May Locher had felt during her last few years. It didn’t matter how hard he sucked at the black air or how deep he dragged it down; it did not satisfy. His heart and head went on pounding, making him feel as if he were suffering the worst hangover of his life.
He was opening his mouth to repeat that he’d take her back when she spoke up, talking in little out-of-breath gasps. “I guess I can make it… but I hope… it won’t take long. Ralph, how come we can feel something this bad even without being able to see the colors? Why can’t they?” She pointed at the media people milling around the Civic Center, “Are we Short-Timers that insensitive? I hate to think that.”
He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, but he thought that perhaps the news crews, video technicians, and security guards clustered around the doors and beneath the spray-painted banner hanging from the canopy did feel something. He saw lots of hands holding styrofoam cups of coffee, but he didn’t see anyone actually drinking the stuff. There was a box of doughnuts sitting on the hood of a station wagon, but the only one which had been taken off had been laid aside on a napkin with just a single bite gone. Ralph i-an his eye over two dozen faces without seeing a single smile. The newspeople were going about their work-setting camera angles, marking locations from which the talking heads would do their standups, laying down coaxial cable and duct-taping it to the cement-but they were doing it without the sort of excitement which Ralph would have expected to accompany a story as big as this one was turning out to be.
Connie Chung walked out from beneath the canopy with a bearded, handsome cameraman-MICHAEL ROSENBERG the tag on his CBS jacket said-and then raised her small hands in a framing gesture, showing him how she wanted him to shoot the bedsheet banner hanging down from the canopy.
Rosenberg nodded. Chung’s face was pale and solemn, and at one point during her conversation with the bearded cameraman, Ralph saw her pause and raise a hand uncertainly to her temple, as if she had lost her train of thought or perhaps felt faint.
There seemed to be an underlying similarity to all the expressions he saw-a common chord-and he thought he knew what it was: they were all suffering from what had been called melancholia when he was a kid, and melancholia was just a fancy word for the blues.
Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day-sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done… and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the how the use would slide over you-unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same-and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up Over your head.
Maybe this is what causes feelings like that, he thought.
Maybe it’s running into something like this-some hig mess of death or sorrow waiting to happen, spread out like a banquet tent made of cobwebs and tears instead of canvas and rope. We don’t see it, not down on our Short-Time level, but we feel it. Oh yes, we feel it. And now…
Now it was trying to suck them dry. Maybe they weren’t vampires, as they both had feared, but this thing was. The deathbag had a sluggish, half-sentient life, and it would suck them dry if it could. if they let it.
Lois stumbled against him and Ralph had all he could do to keep them both from sprawling to the pavement. Then she lifted her head (Slowly, as if her hair had been dipped in cement), curled a hand around her mouth, and inhaled sharply-At the same time she flickered a little. Under other circumstances, Ralph might have dismissed that flicker as a momentary glitch in his own eyes, but not now. She had slid up. just a little. just enough to feed.
He hadn’t seen Lois dip into the waitress’s aura, but this time everything happened in front of him. The auras of the newspeople were like small but brightly colored Japanese lanterns glowing bravely in a vast, gloomy cavern. Now a tight beam of violet light speared out from one of them-from Michael Rosenberg, Connie Chung’s bearded cameraman, in fact. It divided in two an inch or so in front of Lois’s face. The upper branch divided in two again and slipped into her nostrils; the lower branch went between her parted lips and into her mouth. He could see it glowing faintly behind her cheeks, lighting her from the inside as a candle lights a jack-o’-lantern.
Her grip on him loosened, and suddenly the leaning pressure of her weight was gone. A moment later the violet beam of light disappeared.
She looked around at him. Color-not a lot, but somewas returning to her leaden cheeks.
“That’s better-a lot better. Now you, Ralph!”
He was reluctant-it still felt like stealing-but it had to be done if he didn’t want to simply collapse right here; he could almost feel the last of Nirvana Boy’s borrowed energy running out through his pores. He curled his hand around his mouth now as he had in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot that morning and turned slightly to his left, seeking a target. Connie Chung had backed several steps closer to them; she was still looking up at the bedsheet banner hanging from the canopy and talking to Rosenberg (who seemed none the worse for wear as a result of Lois’s borrowing) about it. With no further thought, Ralph inhaled sharply through the curled tube of his fingers.
Chung’s aura was the same lovely shade of wedding-gown ivory as those which had surrounded Helen and Nat on the day they’d come to his apartment with Gretchen Tillbury. Instead of a ray of light, something like a long, straight ribbon shot from Chung’s aura.
Ralph felt strength begin to fill him almost at once, banishing the aching weariness in his joints and muscles. And he could think clearly again, as if a big cloud of sludge had just been washed out of his brain.
Connie Chung broke off, looked up at the sky for a moment, then began to talk to the cameraman again. Ralph glanced around and saw Lois looking at him anxiously. “Any better?” she whispered.
“All kinds,” he said, “but it’s still like being zipped up in a body-bag.”
“I think-” Lois began, and then her eyes fixed on something to the left of the Civic Center doors. She screamed and shrank back against Ralph, her eyes so wide it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.
